


Late Night Conversations

by Lucy_Claire



Category: Arrow (TV 2012), The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: M/M, Prompt Fill
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-09
Updated: 2016-03-09
Packaged: 2018-05-25 16:26:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,579
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6202534
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lucy_Claire/pseuds/Lucy_Claire
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After another team up, everyone crashes at Oliver's, everyone but Oliver himself, who can't sleep, and Barry, who tries to get him to open up a bit about his feelings.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Late Night Conversations

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: 'we're the only ones awake'

It was the end of another team-up between Team Arrow and Team Flash, or, as Thea liked to them Actual Speedy and the Nerds. Team Flash hadn’t gone home yet so they crashed with Oliver,and so did Thea and Laurel, who were too tired to make it back to their home. Cisco had passed out on the couch from exhaustion during their little ‘we survived’ celebration and Caitlin got so drunk she forgot how to get up. Barry carried them to a spare room and didn’t come back, so Oliver assumed that he too had finally crashed.

Barry was the human equivalent of a gas-guzzler sports car, sleek, slim, goes out of control quite easily and if he didn’t get his ridiculous fill of food he would pass out right then there, sometimes go from outrunning sounds to hitting the floor with a slam, already snoring. As someone who survived being shipwrecked and had disciplined his body to withstand pain and hunger, Oliver could lived through a few days without food so he endlessly pitied Barry for tiring out so easily, but he envied him for being able to crash into instant sleep.

Thanks to duty, guilt and stress, Oliver’s brain was too busy to let him sleep, so he tried to tire himself up by doing difficult exercises at either very fast or very slow paces, depending on which parts of himself he wanted to exhaust that day. Tonight Oliver started by doing pull-ups on the bar installed in his room, alternating between five fast lifts and five achingly slow ones.

The sound of glass shattering broke his concentration. Oliver dropped himself and took a bow out from under his bed before sneaking out of his room. The sound of shuffling came from the living room — no, the kitchen. Oliver moved from sliding across one wall to the one opposing it, reading his arrow as he got closer to the doorway.

Oliver hopped around the corner, aimed the arrow and released it at the intruder.

Barry yelped and caught the arrow out of the air, nearly dropping his dustpan full of glass shards. “Ollie, what the hell?”

Oliver relaxed a little, setting down his bow, a tad bit annoyed. “I thought you were an intruder.”

“An intruder? In this heavily fortified place?”

“I seem to remember that the last time your team was here we got a crazy dagger-wielding immortal crashing through my window.”

Barry narrowed his eyes at him, that was as close as his kind, open, sweet face could get to a glare. “It’s like you don’t have villains crashing into your lairs all the time.”

“Me? STAR Labs has a revolving door of unwanted and uninvited guests barging in, let alone super-powered psychopaths.”

“Hey, not all of them are psychopaths, some of them are just messed up and coping with their powers,” Barry argued, dumping the broken glass into the kitchen garbage can. “Sure, some of them are downright crazy, or in Weather Wizard’s case, murderous and vindictive, but a lot of them have reasons, some may have petty reasons but a lot, like Captain Cold, can be helped.”

Oliver bit back a rough remark about how stupid Barry sounded sometimes, treating his life-threatening nightmares as if they were essentially harmless or kids with bad parenting with all the nauseating optimism of a school guidance counselor. He also didn’t feel like this was the time to call him out over Cisco’s ridiculous nicknames for their criminals, as if naming them made them any less real and dangerous.

“You know, maybe if you took their threat level a bit more seriously you wouldn’t have them turning up over and over again and kidnapping members of your family.”

Barry dropped the broom, marching over to Oliver with the dustbin. “Would you look at that, the pot is calling the kettle black.”

Oliver rethought his words. Now that he replayed everything in his head, he did sound like a bit of a hypocrite. He still didn’t get why Barry humanized his criminals so much, that just made them so much harder to deal with. “Alright, I admit that was a bit oblivious.”

“You think?” Barry said, whooshing around the kitchen, putting everything back where he found it and hopping up onto the counter, facing Oliver. “What brought all this up anyway?”

“Nothing.”

Barry did that awful squinty attempt at a glare again, tone annoyed. “Ollie.”

“Nothing out of the ordinary,” Oliver clarified.

“You didn’t typically jump down my throat for ordinary reasons, unless I’ve done something really stupid without noticing lately.”

Oliver shook his head, putting his hands on Barry’s arms, rubbing up down comfortingly. “It’s not you.”

“Oh, God,” Barry groaned. “Nothing good ever comes from those words.”

Rolling his eyes, Oliver tapped Barry’s cheek, the lightest form of an affectionate smack to shut him up. “Whatever thought is spinning around your head, stop it.”

“Can’t help it, one always has to assume the worst with you, or your moods.”

“That’s rich, considering the first time you left my sight you ended up in a ten month coma.”

“You didn’t give that much of a damn about me back then, so it doesn’t count.”

Unexpectedly, those words gave Oliver worse whiplash than the time Barry grabbed him by the belt and dragged him into a super-fast getaway. “Of course I did, and of course it does. You saved my life, kept my secret and were a great friend to me, even when I had been nothing but untrusting and mean to you, of course I cared.”

Barry shoved him. “You had a funny way of showing it.”

“I have a funny way of showing everything compared to you.”

“Hey, I have a healthy range of human emotions, you, on the other hand, do not. It’s quite concerning how much you like being stoic,” said Barry, adding “It also gets kind of annoying after a while, relationships require expressing your feelings and all that,” in a quite voice.

Oliver suddenly felt a bit guilty. “It has nothing to do with liking, this is how I am, I’m suspicious, I’m quiet and I don’t show everyone what I’m thinking all the time.”

“Which is why you are the king of mixed signals,” Barry said pointedly, wagging his eyebrows at him. “But seriously, would it kill you to at least tell me what you’re thinking since your face won’t?”

Oliver smiled, just a little. “Talking maybe, but anything else…being as open as you isn’t something I can afford. If I don’t keep myself and my emotions in check I could fall off the deep end.”

Barry reached out slowly, making sure Oliver wouldn’t react in panic as he set his hand on his face, cupping his jaw. “No, you won’t, you chose to be a hero, you chose to be better, you can also to choose to give yourself a break. Being miserable has nothing do with being tough.”

“I know it doesn’t, it’s just after what happened to me before I returned to Starling, and training with the League, dealing with Merlyn, Tommy and Sara dying, Sara coming back, you nearly dying and then coming back with super-powers, it’s all different levels of coping I haven’t had time to deal with.”

“Yeah, that’s called internalizing,” said Barry. “And it’s never any good. You hold all this stuff in, leaving your only outlet to be beating up bad guys, and it just festers.”

“What do you do to beat it?”

“Talk to my friends, talk to Joe,” Barry said, his voice quieter, gentler now. “Talk to you.”

“Talking burdens others. I don’t want to burden you.”

“It really doesn’t, and it’s not a burden if I want it,” argued Barry. “I want you to talk to me, to confide in me, because that shows that you trust me.”

“You know I trust you!”

“Do I? It’s kinda hard to tell with all that…” Barry waved a finger, encompassing Oliver’s face and making an exaggerated broody pout with his.

“Barry.”

Barry raised his hands palms up, slightly defensive, “I’m just saying!”

Oliver grabbed the wrist of the hand near his shoulder, pulling Barry close and wrapping his arms around his waist. “I know, I know I can be really hard to deal with and that I need to assure you of how I’m feeling and what I’m doing but I want you to know that I’ll always trust you and that you should never have to question how I feel about you.”

“And how you feel about me is…?” Barry fished, failing at being coy.

Oliver aimed a dull stare at him. “You really need me to say it out loud?”

“Yes, Oliver, I do.” Barry waved between them. “A guy needs some validation.”

“You know I love you, why else would I put up with your sickening niceness and optimism.”

“And that kind of talk is why I think you need some openness in your miserable, miserable life.”

“I’m not always miserable.”

“Oh?”

“Having you around is a sure way to make me smile.”

Barry wrapped his arms around his neck and pulled him closer, pressing their foreheads and noses together. “Guess I’ll have to visit more often, you know, for your emotional health and all.”

“Guess you will. What are you doing up anyway?”

“Can’t sleep, I felt like there was something I didn’t do.”

Oliver pressed himself closer. “Could that something be me?”

“It could be.”

 

**Author's Note:**

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